US Army cuts brigades to render them ‘more lethal’

Twelve US-based brigades will be deactivated by 2017 to fit a slashed military budget. Despite cuts of over 80,000 troops, top brass assures that combat readiness will not suffer because the remaining brigades will have more battalions and firepower.

Army Chief of Staff General Ray Odierno announced Tuesday plans
have been approved to inactivate 10 Brigade Combat Teams (BCTs)
with headquarters on the US territory. This comes under the $487
billion military budget cuts mandated in 2011 by the Budget
Control Act, a fourth round of military budget cuts since
President Barack Obama entered office.

It has been announced that the final cut of the service in five
years is expected to be 80,000 service personnel, most of which
is to come through attrition, Orieno said giving the difference
from a wartime high of 570,000 soldiers to 490,000 by the end of
2017.

Overall drop in the number of BCT will be from current 45 to 33,
as the US Army plans to return to about the same number of
enlisted servicemen it had before the Iraq war started, it was
announced at General Odierno’s press conference.

A standard American infantry BCT currently has roughly 3,500
servicemen.

The announced cuts, which are mainly to affect the active-duty
force, could also be regarded as reorganization of the military,
which has been conducting wars for the last 12 years. The Army
Reserve will remain at 205,000 soldiers and the state-based
National Guard militia will lose 8,000 soldiers, dropping to
350,000 from 358,000.

‘Increasing tooth-to-tail ratio’

General Odierno explained that whereas the number of BCT is
decreasing, the number of battalions in them will grow from
present two to three thus increasing the Army’s “tooth-to-tail
ratio.”

Besides an additional battalion, which is usually 600-800
soldiers, BCTs will have more engineers assigned. It is expected
that remaining brigades would be somewhere close to 5,000
personnel instead of the today’s 3,500 servicemen and women.

“We will add a third maneuver battalion and additional
engineer and fires capability to each of our armor and infantry
brigade combat teams in order to make them more lethal, more
flexible and more agile,” Odierno said.

Reportedly, the decision to beef up the number of servicemen in a
BTC came as a recommendation from commanders with combat
experience in Iraq and Afghanistan. In their view personnel
proliferation will extend fighting capabilities of the brigades
on a battlefield.

In this way the impact on combat power will be minimized and the
savings will be made at the expense of support units outside of
BCT and logistics.

General Ray Odierno insists the cuts were thoroughly calculated
after thousands of hours of planning, personnel interviews and
simulated combat tests. Naturally, because the brigades are
slashed for economic reasons, the final selection was based on
cost and logistic effectiveness, required training resources,
ranges, airspace and infrastructure, as well as local economic
impacts once BCTs are gone, Odierno said.

“I know in the local communities it will have its impact,”
Odierno told reporters on Tuesday. “But we've done our best to
reach out to them so they understand what the impacts are. We've
tried to make it as small an impact as possible for as many
communities as we could,” he said.

The deactivation of 10 BCTs comes as the first round of military
reduction, because if the Congress does not reconsider austerity
in military spending, the number of service personnel will be
reduced even lower than the planned 490,000 troops.

A member of the Armed Services Committee, Democrat US Congressman
Adam Smith warned that, “The real hazard to military
effectiveness will persist as long as Congress fails to act on
sequestration. If sequestration is not removed, then more
extensive force structure changes will need to be made.”

The chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, Howard P.
McKeon, promised his panel “will carefully examine the
implications of this initial restructuring, but we all must
understand that this is only the tip of the iceberg, much deeper
cuts are still to come.”

Whether they will be accompanied by same ‘tooth-to-tail ratio
increases’ remains to be seen.